Hal Roberts, at the Berkman Center, blogs that he’s found that three suppliers of tools that allow those in China to circumvent the government’s restrictions on the Internet — DynaWeb FreeGate, GPass, and FirePhoenix — are selling information about the behavior of their users.

The sites freely publish anonymized data for people doing research on Net trends, but they will also sell you identifiable information … if you pass their smell test. Hal points to one company’s faq:

Q: I am interested in more detailed and in-depth visit data. Are they available?

A: Yes, we can generate custom reports that cover different levels of details for your purposes, based on a fee. But data that can be used to identify a specific user are considered confidential and not shared with third parties unless you pass our strict screening test. Please contact us if you have such a need.

From hands considered safe to the hands of totalitarians with a grudge is a distressingly short distance.

Hal concludes:

This sort of thing demonstrates that there is no way to eliminate points of control from a network. You can only move them around so that you trust different people. In this case, Chinese users are replacing some of the trust in their local Chinese ISPs with trust in the circumvention projects through which they are proxying their traffic. But those tools are acting as virtual ISPs themselves and so have all the potential for control (and abuse) that the local ISPs have. They can snoop on user activity; they can filter and otherwise tamper with connections; they can block P2P traffic.

So, yes, the Net routes around restrictions. But those routes themselves are subject to all the weaknesses to which we are heir. [Tags: berkman china censorship hal_roberts tor ]

[January 15: Rebecca MacKinnon spoke with some of the principles and blogs their explanations.]

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Not that Doc needs validation by the mainstream media, but I still think it’s pretty cool that the Washington Post has snagged one of his photos off of Flickr to illustrate their article about Dean Elena Kagan being selected as Obama’s Solictor General. (Of course that’s Jonathan Zittrain behind her.)

Dean Kagan is beloved at Harvard Law. Deservedly.

[Tags: doc_searls elena_kagan harvard_law copyright copyleft flickr ]

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Ed Felten offers a brief and useful taxonomy of Net neutrality. The discussion in the comments is helpful, too. So are David Isenberg’s additional thoughts.

Before the anti-NN folks pounce on the admitted ambiguity of the term, I have two comments.

First, free speech is even harder to pin down and apply, but it’s still a principle worth supporting. (Preemptive defense: No, I’m not saying free speech and NN are equally important. I’m making a point about the logic of the argument.)

Second, as far as I’m concerned, the core of NN, and underneath all three of Ed’s flavors, is the idea that the network should be equally open to all ideas. Or, put differently, those who provide access to the Net should not be allowed to favor some bits over others. Put thirdly, no one should be allowed to decide for others what the Net is for.

None of these formulations are easy to apply. Even doing a first-in-first-out prioritization favors some bits over others. But, this is exactly the same sort of argument one has about free speech: “Oh yeah, Mr. Free Speecher. So you think spies ought to be able to blab state secrets, and there shouldn’t be laws against perjury…?” NN is the right principle. How it’s applied is a matter of justice and politics.

[Tags: net_neutrality ed_felten david_isenberg ]

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The national media syndicate GateHouse Media owns 125 local newspapers in Massachusetts, and runs the Wicked Local local news sites. The Boston Globe is not part of GateHouse Media. The Globe has started its own local sites, such as this one in Newton, MA. The Globe’s local sites run lots of news from the Globe, but they also aggregate local headlines from other sources, including from GateHouse. Those headlines link to the original sites, of course.

So, GateHouse now has sued the Globe‘s parent for copyright and trademark infringement, because GateHouse would prefer that no one know about or care about what it writes.

GateHouse is apparently unsure of how this whole Web thang works. Plus, the company’s lawyers skipped class the day Fair Use was discussed. Bad combination. Bad for GateHouse. Bad for the Web.

By the way, the title of this post is the headline from the Newton Tab, a GateHouse publication.

PS: There’s some feisty coverage of this in Cape Cod Today. [Tags: copyright copyleft boston boston_globe gatehouse fair_use ]

Later: Dan Gillmor raises good points, unsurprisingly. He usefully complicates the issue.

Later: Berkman’s Citizen Media Law Project has written up some preliminary thoughts. These are some topnotch lawyers and legal writers, so that’s the pond in which you’ll want to do your initial dives.

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BugLabs has named a breakout board after Eric von Hippel, open innovation guru and Berkman Fellow. Here’s an interview with Eric, in which he says, among other things: “Users are becoming the dominant innovators”:

[Tags: innovation berkman eric_von_hippel breakout_boards open_source copyright copyleft ]

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Last Friday, Berkman hosted a panel discussion among some of the founders and leaders of Creative Commons: Jamie Boyle, Joi Ito, Molly S. Van Houweling, and Lawrence Lessig. The conversation was guided by Jonathan Zittrain, who is brilliant at this and quite hilarious. Here’s the video.

Don’t forget to support Creative Commons.

[Tags: creative_commons berkman copyright copyleft ]

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The RIAA has announced that it’s not going to sue music downloaders, although it’s holding open the possibility of suing the most egregious offenders.

I like to think it took one look at Charlie Nesson’s case and fled with its short tail between its legs.

This is good news not only for those who have felt the full, brutal force of the RIAA’s whim-driven prosecutions, but because it helps the clear the ground for a longer, more considered redressing of the balance of rights and values.

[Tags: riaa music copyright copyleft charlie_nesson ]

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In this week’s Radio Berkman podcast, I interview Stephen Schultze about the FCC’s auctioning off spectrum to a national provider who would be required to use 25% of it for free, nationwide wifi. There’s only one catch: That wifi would have to only connect to sites and services that are safe for minors (defined as people between 5 and 18).

After we had recorded this interview last week, the FCC postponed voting on the proposal, and since it’s the baby of the outgoing Chair, it’s probably postponed forever. Still, the idea raises some really interesting issues. Steve and I focus on the free speech considerations, although the opposition from other spectrum-holders certainly could not have encouraged the FCC.

[Tags: berkman fcc wifi wi-fi spectrum free_speech censorship kevin_martin podcast stephen_schultze ]

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In the wake of yesterday’s repudiatathon of the WSJ.com’s misleading, inaccurate, biased, and wrong article on Net neutrality, the NY Times weighs in with a crisp, clear, and right-headed editorial.

[Tags: net_neutrality wsj policy nyt obama ]

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Stephen Schultze as usual has a helpful post on the WSJ’s misreporting of Google’s supposed violation of the Net neutrality principle that Google has long supported. Steve points to Google’s Rick Whitt’s reply and to an aggregation of posts that makes it clear that this issue is being spun — and rather clumsily — by the WSJ into something it isn’t.

David Isenberg provides excellent, fightin’ analysis, including the following:

In other words, if Google does edge caching it buys access. It’s the same as when I, as a residential customer, pay $34.95 for one megabit DSL service or $49.95 for 3 megabit DSL.

cThe concern of Network Neutrality advocates is not with access but with delivery. The fear is that Internet connection providers would charge for expedited delivery of certain content to the end user, and in so doing would put themselves in the business of classifying which content gets enhanced delivery. Since they were charging for expedited delivery, they’d get more revenue for improving the enhanced delivery, so the only network upgrades would be for the enhanced service. Non-enhanced would fall further and further behind. Plus the power to decide what gets delivered might, indeed, be powerful, and power corrupts; just ask NARAL.

Since the edge caching Google is proposing is about access, not delivery, there’s no problem.

Net neutrality is not about everyone having equal access to the Net. Net neutrality is not about Google (or Microsoft or WSJ.com) being able to pay for fatter pipes, faster servers, or fancy-pants caching equipment that keeps the most-requested pages in memory and ready to go. Net neutrality is about not letting the carriers decide whose bits are more important than others once those bits have entered the network. It’s about the carriers not slowing down the Internet telephony bits from competitors or delaying your YouTube bits because the carriers think their “The Nanny” re-run bits are more important.

I do have to stand in admiration of whatever PR person pitched this story to WSJ. Masterfully done! [Tags: google net_neutrality ]

LATER: Scott Rosenberg on the inadequacy of the WSJ’s response. Harold Feld on what Google is up to. Tim Karr on the entrenchment of Net neutrality. Richard Bennett on why this is non-news (and why Net neutrality is non-neutral, or at least a myth).

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